Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Adapted from Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage
to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (2011)
3. An ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. Our lives are filled with inner
and outer contradictionsour own behavior sometimes belies our aspirations,
while the world around us sometimes denies what we value and believe to be true.
If we fail to hold these contradictions creatively, they will shut us down and take
us out of the action. But if we allow their tensions to expand our minds and hearts,
they can open us to new understandings of ourselves and our world, enhancing our
lives and allowing us to enhance other peoples lives. We are flawed and finite
beings whose understanding is always partial and in need of correction. The
genius of the human heart lies in its capacity to use the tensions that come with our
limitations to generate insight, energy, and new life. Making the most of those
gifts requires a fourth key habit of the heart
4. A sense of personal voice and agency. Insight and energy give rise to new life
as we speak out and act out our own version of truth, while checking and
correcting it against the truths of others. But many of us lack confidence in own
voices and in our power to make a difference. We grow up in educational and
religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a
drama, and as a result we become adults who treat politics as a spectator sport.
And yet it remains possible for us, young and old alike, to find our voices, learn
how to speak them, and know the satisfaction that comes from contributing to
positive changeif we have the support of a community. Which leads to a fifth
and final habit of the heart
1
Terry Tempest Williams, The Open Space of Democracy (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock
Publishers, 2010), pp. 83-84.
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